Do we still need to extend the quaint courtesy of letting people know where we found a link from another Twitter user? I think the retweet, aka RT (in both its informal and official forms), has run its course.
There are now over 200 million Twitter accounts (not all active), with nearly half a million being added daily. There are over a billion tweets a week. As tens of thousands of print publications have opened up shop online, and with the continued growth in things like personal blogs, Posterous, and Tumblr, there are now exponentially more sources for links than there were two years ago.
I think it’s time to recognize that Twitter is the world’s largest and most important source of community validated information. That information can stand on its own. It is not important to know who posted it last, only where it was published first.
I understand the appeal of the RT from an etiquette standpoint, and I do use them most of the time unless there are two or more original tweeters or the format of an RT eats too deeply into the space available for the actual information in the tweet.
I also realize the RT underlies Twitter popularity and “influence” measurements across the social media world, but does it really tell us much? We’re still in a 140-character world. Do we need to trip over ourselves to add the RT information to a tweet that didn’t originate with the person we are retweeting in the first place? There is so much information moving through Twitter, around 140 million tweets a day. Does the RT really carry that much useful information?
As I guessed in my first post, my recent foursquare “stalker” experience was a PR stunt for ifidie.net, a Facebook app that allows users to create messages that will be distributed when they die. The caller who spoke to me when I was at Great Bear in Los Gatos unfortunately gave the wrong URL. ifidie.com, as evidenced by this “video” the company posted on YouTube which is an audio recording of the call:
An interesting outcome of this has been the number of people who have not hesitated to criticize me and call me names. Many made some kind of leap that I was either surprised or disturbed that someone could locate me as a result of my foursquare use. Anyone drawing such a conclusion has some basic reading comprehension issues. I have written a narrative of the events so that people understand the tools available to marketers via location-based services and the dynamics that exist when activities — personal and commercial, online and offline — begin to merge.
As for the ifidie PR campaign, I would say it worked to a degree. I was intrigued about it. I wrote about it on my blog. People talked about it. But what they talked about was not ifidie.net, but its tactics. There wasn’t any conversation about the site, though maybe some traffic will go there (now that I have it right.) With people so concerned about privacy, the buzz around this might have been more negative than positive.
Finally, I now know that there were many other people targeted by ifidie.org. If you @aliciasaintives @adamostrow @mikwhite and others also received phone calls.
On Wednesday, I had my first experience with a foursquare stalker when a stranger called me at the Great Bear Cafe in Los Gatos, California after I did a 4sq check-in. I considered the whole thing harmless if not a little strange.
Today, it happened again when I checked into a cafe here in town. Right after I left, I heard a girl shouting my name and running down the sidewalk after me (and my kids) as she did the universal two-fingers-to-the-ear gesture indicating a phone call. She caught up with me and said someone was on the phone back at the cafe, and said it was very important they speak to me. I told her someone harmless was stalking me, not to worry about it, and to try to take a message. I also apologized that her time was taken up with all of this.
When I checked in with her a little later, she told me the caller refused to leave a message and became belligerent when the best answer she could give to my whereabouts was “walking down the street.” She told me the caller reminded her of a local crazy person who had called the cafe in the past, and wondered if it might be the same one.
After the cafe, where we went for coffee, we went to a different cafe. I did a check-in, but not until we left, and I added a comment that I had already left and to not bother calling. The owners of the cafe are an elderly couple and I thought they might be disturbed by a call. (Though they may have gotten one any way).
All of this is starting to affect my foursquare usage. (”Duh,” you might say.) I don’t care that someone is following me. I have nothing to hide and I don’t see any harm in people knowing I am in public places where everyone can see me any way. (I’ve done many posts on this in the past. I have a lot of boundaries on foursquare. I don’t disclose the location of my home, of the school my children attend, their names, locations of their friends’ homes, their after-school activities, etc.)
Whatever this is, prank, harassment, marketing stunt, etc., is however interrupting people at work, and they might not be so understanding.
The latest version of foursquare has made checking-in very competitive. I’ve seen a real upswing in use by existing users and an influx of new users. I hope the intent of this “campaign” is not to get me to stop using foursquare. Maybe it’s to alert people (or me) to the risks. I don’t know. But it’s getting interesting.
Foursquare brought me closer to death today. Around 8:15 a.m. I checked in at the Apple Store in Los Gatos, California, and then walked a few doors down and checked in at Great Bear Cafe, where I ordered a mocha.
From across the cafe I heard “Is there a Joel Postman here? You have a phone call.” The young woman behind the counter said, “He says it’s an emergency.” I was a little puzzled since no one knew where I was, at least no one other than everyone on the Internet since I just checked in on foursquare.
I picked up the phone and said “hello,” and the brief conversation went like this:
Caller (with ominous voice): Death can find you anywhere, even at the Great Bear
Me (somewhat less ominous voice): OK
Caller: Go to if I die dot-com
Me: OK. I will. I guess I’ll say thank you then
I went to the web site but I must have misheard as there was nothing of interest there. I’m not sure what this is all about, whether it’s a prank, or part of a marketing stunt. I searched on “death” and “foursquare” on Google and didn’t find any mention of this. Maybe I’ll learn more soon.
Update: I’m fairly certain I was supposed to go to ifidie.org and not ifidie.com, and that this was some kind of PR or marketing stunt. My friend Nick gave me a link to an interesting story last July about foursquare stalking. I consider my experience Wednesday harmless, though I was surprised that someone would contact me in person at the cafe. This sort of breaks the plane we imagine separates us from some of our more distant Internet friends, but which increasingly, does not.
Like me, maybe you’ve been reading about clout, Klout or KLOWT. Traditionally the word means influence or power. It now refers to a complex measurement of a person’s or company’s social media influence.
It has been said that one of the nicest things about industry standards is there are so many to choose from. The same would hold true for definitions of clout. Klout, which touts itself as the Standard for Influence, explains its calculations on its web site.
This post was triggered by a question on Quora: “How many types of web content are now affected by social credibility, increasingly known as ‘clout’?” (If you haven’t used Quora, it’s typical for well-meaning people to introduce into evidence facts not yet established by inserting them into the question.)
I was struck by the similarity of approach and sharp contrast in details found in the first two responses. Lee Traupel defines the kinds of content and other factors that contribute to or are affected by clout as:
Measurement of Social Presence (Platforms & Communities)
Content Creation and Curation Activities (Blog, YouTube, Social Accounts)
Interconnectivity via Social Stream (not Connections)
Popularity of Community Content where Content is Published
Growth Components of Social Presence (Accounts & Communities)
and indicates this will grow and change. Brian Mickley offers this list:
Certainly, Quora ‘likes’
Shopping recommendations online
Links to web sites recommended socially by ‘the crowd’
YouTube views - going viral
Emails forwarded virtually around the world in hours
Forums - MrExcel.com had 906 online when I visited recently
Microsoft MVPs and similar programs
Today, (no fault of Lee or Brian who have both done a good job helping the rest of us understand this), I see the world of clout calculation:
The idea of clout seems to be an extension of the original extended Twitter influence notion, that influence was not determined simply by how many followers you have, but additionally, by how many followers they have, and how often you are retweeted.
All of the factors Brian and Lee mention will to some degree influence people, but many of these are tautologies. Let’s take content creation. If you write something and post it on your blog, you may end up influencing people. But to say that content creation is a measure of influence is to say that activities that influence people tend to be influential.
The larger problem is that these measurements are being bought and sold, and are being used as the measure of value of a blog, Twitter account or Facebook page. But without a standardized measurement system, the measurements themselves are interesting at best and of no comparative use.
I am just as skeptical about “clout” as I was (and still am) about the original influence idea. If you are in social media for business purposes, influence means you have moved someone to take an action that is strategic to your business. That could be a purchase, a subscription, a membership, a referral, a request to the company for additional information. You could have 20000 Twitter followers and 1 million views of your YouTube video with 275000 retweets, but if no one is buying your product, your influence is ZERO.
Tags: RT, Twitter, retweet, irrelevant
